This is the latest piece in Sadie Harrison’s ongoing series ‘Gallery’. It was written in response to a walk that I took from Epping to Wapping on the 19th November. In a note that I posted about one of my ‘walking sketches’ I noted:

…and it turns out that I had just tramped over a lovely corner of the forest (which was given to the people of London by Q Victoria in 1881) named for my grandfather-‘Sheppard’s Meadow’

This was Sadie’s lovely answer. Oddly, I can hear something of my late ‘Papa’, as I called my Grandfather, Sam Sheppard, it what she describes (in the performance instruction) as it’s ‘nostalgic whimsy’. Here it is, recorded in the Shoe Factory, on the 28th November.

pushing through a brake of ferns not far from the lost Fairmead Lodge, an owl bursts from beneath my feet (echoes of other walkers around here-John Clare, de Stael, Viotti all around)